


Curtain Material

by Monksandbones



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Memoirs, Politics, Post-Canon, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-18 11:46:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21810358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monksandbones/pseuds/Monksandbones
Summary: The best revenge is writing a surprisingly excellent memoir.
Comments: 28
Kudos: 132
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Curtain Material

**Author's Note:**

  * For [melannen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/gifts).



> Thanks to [misbegotten](/users/misbegotten/) and [ineptshieldmaid](/users/ineptshieldmaid/) for beta-reading and britpicking, and for cheering me on!

_Listen, Nicola, no offence, but you're not leadership material, yeah? I mean, fucking curtain material in that outfit, but you know._

-Malcolm Tucker, _The Thick of It_ , series 3 episode 6

* * *

**Katie R. Murray** <krmurray1993@gmail.com>  
To: Mum  
Subject: Re: !!!!!!

That’s incredible, Mum! I told you!! Xx

**Nicola A. Murray** <nicolaamurray@mail.co.uk>  
To: Katie  
Subject: !!!!!!

!!!!!!

—— Forwarded Message ——  
From: divyasharma@madeleinemilburn.co.uk  
Date: Wednesday, January 10, 2024  
Subject: Good news  
To: Nicola Murray <nicolaamurray@mail.co.uk>

Hello Nicola,

I’m very pleased to inform you that I have received a bid from Bloomsbury for your manuscript. Details to follow, but I’m confident that this is a good fit, and I’m prepared to roll up my sleeves and negotiate a gold-plated deal for you! Please let me know at your earliest convenience whether you would like me to proceed on your behalf.

Warmest congratulations,

  
Divya

Divya Sharma  
Literary Agent  
Memoir and Biography  
Madeleine Milburn Literary, TV & Film Agency  
+44-020-555-4039

* * *

**Bloomsbury Books Catalogue**   
**October–December 2024**

**Curtain Material**   
_My Life in Politics and After_

Nicola A. Murray

Politics/United Kingdom/Memoir  
Bloomsbury Publishing | 12/2/2024  
9022776202 | £19.99  
Hardback | 298 pages  
24 cm in H | 16 cm in W

**The former Cabinet Minister and Leader of the Opposition spins the straw of an unsuccessful political career into autobiographical gold in this unexpected memoir.**

Former cabinet minister and leader of the opposition Nicola Murray left politics after losing her seat in the House of Commons in the general election of 2014. Ten years later, with her party securely back in government, she reflects on her career and its failures. The result is a funny, unflinching insider account of a party losing its grip on power and tearing itself apart in the process, but it is Murray’s finely drawn self-portrait—by turns touching, humorous, and scathingly self-critical—that sets the book apart from others in the genre. 

**Praise:**

“As a former colleague I can only agree with Murray: her political career was a disaster. Nevertheless, I welcome her re-emergence as a political commentator and memoirist. I of course have my own perspective on the events Murray describes, but I thoroughly enjoyed her retelling, and found myself rethinking some of my recollections in light of her analysis.” _–Rt Hon Clare Ballentine, Home Secretary_

“Not only a clear-eyed autopsy of a failed political career, but also… a touching comedic gem.” _-The Telegraph_

“Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the experiences of female political leaders in the twenty-first century.” _-Rt Hon Kim Campbell, 19th Prime Minister of Canada_

* * *

_For the whole gang: James, Dan, Ollie, Ben, and above all, Malcolm._

* * *

_**The Independent** _   
**Culture > Books > Reviews**

**_Curtain Material_ by Nicola Murray, book review: An undistinguished career yields a surprisingly excellent memoir**

As a politician, Nicola Murray was perhaps best known to the British public for her unerring ability to bollocks up even the most straightforward of media appearances. Her career, from her appointment to Cabinet as Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Citizenship under Prime Minister Tom Davis, to her forced resignation as Leader of the Opposition three years later, was littered with gaffes, large and small. Her departure from politics, a casualty of the near-obliteration of her party in the general election of 2014, barely registered, except among party insiders who presumably sighed in relief.

Murray’s witty, articulate memoir shines all the brighter in contrast to her undistinguished political career. By her own account, she has spent the past decade rebuilding her life while grappling with her failure as a politician, and this book is the end result of that process.

Although Murray’s humiliating resignation as Leader of the Opposition might seem like an obvious point of departure for a meditation on a failed career, she begins instead with a gripping, intimate, almost claustrophobic account of the disaster of the election of 2014 writ small. We wait nervously with Murray for the first returns from her constituency. We feel the walls close in as she hears the projection that she will not hold her seat. We watch as she delivers a statement that she will later have to reconstruct from eyewitness and media accounts, and goes home to a bitter row with her then-husband. It is the end of her political career, although she does not realize it immediately.

From her final moments in politics, Murray returns to the beginning of her career, re-examining her actions and decisions, and the broader political context, in an attempt to understand what went wrong. Her narrative, brimming with the confidence and political finesse she so obviously lacked while in office, adroitly weaves her own experiences into a keenly-observed, often funny account of a tired government, and a party collapsing in upon itself. There are insider details, from the significant (the party’s genuine paralysis following the resignation of Tom Davis), to the trifling (the perpetual stash of sweets in Ben Swain’s filing cabinet), to the scandalous (a disastrous affair), and the book is worth reading solely for Murray’s trenchant commentary on some of the leading political figures of her day.

Nevertheless, the highlight of Murray's memoir is her self-analysis, and she draws her own self-portrait as sharply as she does her depictions of her colleagues. A decade on, she shows a refreshing willingness to confront her weaknesses and errors as a politician, and to admit that she was in over her head from the moment she was appointed to Cabinet. Although she gives due consideration to the structural challenges that faced her as a female politician, and the personal (a strained marriage) and temperamental (she hints at a struggle with anxiety) factors that might have contributed to her failure, she concludes that, despite boundless ambition to the contrary, she was simply “not cut out for politics.” Few former politicians would admit as much, but Murray’s candid assessment of her lack of political ability, along with her newly-revealed literary flair, has given us a surprisingly excellent memoir, one that will place her among the likes of Alan Clark, Chris Mullin, and John Major in the pantheon of political autobiographers.

_Curtain Material: My Life in Politics and After_ by Nicola A. Murray is available in hardback from Bloomsbury for £19.99

* * *

_**Have I got News for You** _   
**Series 67 Episode 9**

...“This is the news that Elizabeth Warren and Chrystia Freeland laced up their trainers and went for a lunch-hour power walk during Freeland’s historic visit to Washington, DC. Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic criticized the two leaders for taking a break from cleaning up after the combined seventy-seven men who have previously led their governments. And while I’m on the topic, stop calling it a bromance, Internet. It’s 2024! Give us the vapid portmanteau for female friendship we deserve!”

“In other news, this unexpected figure released a book this week, and it has ruffled feathers in certain circles.”

“Wait, I know this one! This has to be Nicola Murray rising like a sea cucumber out of the murky depths with her political memoirs.”

“The spectre at the feast of her former party’s return to government.”

“The masque of the red death.”

“Though in fairness, she did wait until her party was back in power before she put the boot in her former colleagues, which is a better piece of strategy than anything she tried while she was still in politics. Or was she playing twelve-dimensional chess all along?”

“You know, I went down to Ladbrokes after the Goolding Inquiry and said ‘all right, I want to put some money on who will be first to release a damning memoir about all this.’ I remember I got surprisingly good odds on Tucker, seeing as he was going to prison and it was as likely as not that he’d say the wrong thing and get himself shanked, but she wasn’t even on the coupon.”

“Well, my bet was on Miller, provided he could find a ghostwriter desperate enough. Sorry, lads. It looks like someone else is buying the first round tonight.”

“Ladies and gentlefolk, it’s dark horse Nicola Murray! Nicola Murray wins it by fifteen lengths with her surprise, and surprisingly readable, memoirs.”

* * *

**_The Guardian_ **   
**Books Interview**   
**Memoir**

**Nicola Murray: “I wasn’t cut out for top-level politics"**

The former leader of the opposition reflects on failure—and picking up the pieces.

**…Your book is as much an extended meditation on coming to terms with failure as it is a political memoir. Is that what you set out to write?**

I knew it was a meditation on failure before I knew it was a memoir or even a book, to tell the truth. Going on after that kind of failure—well, it took me a long time to even recognize that it was a failure, and the emotional reckoning was brutal. I did a lot of soul searching—I had a lot of therapy—and I spent ten years learning to live with what happened. Then the new government, my former party, swept into power, and it shook something loose. Everything I had been thinking about was clanging about in my head and I had to sit down and write an explanation that made sense of who I had been and who I am now.

**Your lowest moment came at a family dinner after you lost your seat in the general election of 2014.**

Yes. It was a few months on from the election, at the holidays. I don’t remember what set it off. My kids and I were at my parents’ house for an extended family dinner. I’d been looking for work, talking to my solicitor, making a decent show of keeping my chin up—or so I thought. I remember I was laying the table. I was putting out my mum's starched serviettes, and I totally lost it. It was like the fountains at Versailles all coming on at once. It was Niagara Falls. There I was, sobbing in the dining room, with my tremendously successful brother and sister-in-law helping my mum in the kitchen, and my kids and their cousins in the next room watching the football on the telly with my dad.

My memory isn’t very clear, but I think my parents sort of bundled me off to a bedroom. I remember them sitting next to me on the bed in the dark, trying to comfort me. They were shocked and baffled, of course—they were in their late seventies at the time, and here was their middle-aged daughter, the former Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and Alternative Prime Minister of Great Britain and northern Ireland, weeping inconsolably in their arms. I couldn’t even pull myself together enough to tell them what was wrong.

The worst of it was that they had always been so proud of me. They never doubted for a moment that I would be Prime Minister. It wasn’t that I felt I was a disappointment to them—it was that they believed in me utterly and completely, and they were wrong. That’s when it started to sink in properly that there were no extenuating factors to blame for what had happened. I had done what felt like my best, and I had genuinely failed. After I resigned as Leader of the Opposition, I was able to insulate myself by blaming all kinds of structural factors—the hostility of the media to female politicians, or the glass cliff effect—and reminding myself that I had been stabbed in the back by my advisors. This time, there was nothing like that. My own constituency, which returned me to parliament three times, the last through a change of government, had rejected me. It was devastating.

**You were in the middle of a divorce then as well.**

Yes, but honestly, losing my seat was worse. I know that's a terrible comment on my marriage, but divorcing James was a relief in comparison—and one of the only benefits I could see to being out of politics was that I could do it quietly, without stirring up a media circus. But at any rate, that horrible dinner—you know, it was probably delicious, but I was too upset to eat anything—that dinner was when I realized that it was time to give up. I wasn’t cut out for top-level politics, and I was going to have to raze my life to the ground and rebuild it brick-by-brick. Which I think I’ve managed to do, in the end.

But I must say it’s taken me years of uneventful holiday dinners to even begin to live down my performance that night. A career can be rebuilt, but there’s no coming back from that kind of thing.

* * *

_**The Guardian** _   
**Books Podcast**

**Nicola Murray on political memoirs, Malcolm Tucker, and surprising herself.**

On this week’s show, Aidan Foyle and Nicola Murray discuss the intersection of the personal and the political in her bestselling memoir.

...

AIDAN: Of course, anyone who reads a political memoir is hoping to catch a whiff of scandal.

NICOLA: It’s true. I wrote the entire book with my right hand resting on a copy of Alan Clark’s diaries.

AIDAN: In your case, the whiff of scandal brings us to ex-Director of Communications, and now ex-con, Malcolm Tucker, who looms large in the book, starting with the pointed dedication, and also, you’ve hinted, with the title.

NICOLA: Yes. I took the title from a comment he made to me while I was still at DoSAC, when I fumbled my way into the rumour that I was launching a leadership challenge against Tom Davis. He said something like “No offence, Nicola, you’re not leadership material. Fucking curtain material in that dress, though.” And he said the second part with this little wave of his hand that was—it was brilliant, just devastating. I’ve never forgotten. That’s what he was like then. You couldn’t help but enjoy it a little even when it felt like he was literally flaying the flesh from your bones.

NICOLA: Obviously, I had to leave “fucking” out of the title.

AIDAN: You worked closely with Malcolm Tucker, who was the midwife and the executioner of your frontbench career—openly so, in the latter case. But perhaps the most shocking revelation in your book is that the two of you also had a short-lived but, one gets the sense, rather passionate affair in 2009 after the coalition talks broke down and your party fell from power. I have to ask, first of all, how on earth did you keep that from coming out, considering all the publicity surrounding your resignation and the Goolding Inquiry—not to mention his trial?

NICOLA: It’s easy to forget that he actually was the Dark Lord of spin, isn’t it? It was never in his best interest to leak it, so he never did, and it certainly wasn’t in mine.

AIDAN: But you wrote about it.

NICOLA: It was one of the most difficult parts of the book to write. I wanted to be fair about it. We were both desperately unhappy at the time. For myself, I thought it would be worth it to be able to feel close to someone for a little while. I’ve always suspected he felt something similar, although I don’t know, and I tried not to speak for him on that point.

AIDAN: It ended disastrously.

NICOLA: Of course it did. Far more disastrously than I could have imagined, really, which is why I decided I couldn't leave it out of the book.

AIDAN: You fell out over the party leadership.

NICOLA: Among other things, but the party leadership was the crux of it. He didn’t think I could win and he didn’t want me to stand. But the deeper problem was that there was no clear frontrunner for the leadership. Even if there had been, we were facing years out of power—which I think is why I ultimately won, actually, against his objections. When the party brought him back in 2011 to bail me out as my media advisor, it wasn’t the same. He hated me. I certainly wouldn’t suggest that it was all because of the affair—just look at my record as leader—but there was an edge to it that felt personal in a way it never had before. It was as though the fact that we had—well, been something to each other, made my performance a kind of personal betrayal as well as a disaster for the party. And I think that when he set up the scenario to force my resignation, that was what made him twist the knife so viciously.

AIDAN: But you liked each other before that.

NICOLA: We almost liked each other.

AIDAN: Do you consider this book your revenge?

NICOLA: That isn’t really how I think of it, no. I waited until the party was in government again with a comfortable majority, didn’t I? And I do think the party and government are both in very good hands these days. No, revenge wasn’t at the top of my mind while I was writing it. Exorcism is probably a better word.

AIDAN: You must be happy with how well it has been received, though.

NICOLA: I’ve been pleasantly… well, gobsmacked is the word, honestly. I’d never have suspected that it would be so popular—or that people would seem to like me so much after reading it—though I have to admit that the holiday sales figures have felt a bit revenge-shaped. And I sent a signed copy with the bestseller sticker on it to Malcolm for New Year’s.

AIDAN: That certainly smacks of vengeance.

NICOLA: Oh, I definitely meant that as revenge. I’m not so far above it as all that.

* * *

**Malcolm Tucker** <mftucker97@gmail.com>  
To: Nicola Murray<nicolaamurray@mail.co.uk>  
Subject: none

Nicky,

Ta for the copy of your book, and for the 23 unsolicited (and fucking counting) interview requests I’ve received in connection with it. I wasn’t going to read it, but I was bored one afternoon and there it was in a stack of bank statements and other useless documents. Having a look seemed ever so slightly more interesting than running the lot through the paper shredder, and here we are.

I would wish you’d shown even the faintest glimmer of the brains and political instincts you put into the book while you were still in politics, but that would be missing the fucking point, wouldn’t it? Not to mention crying over a fucking ocean of spilled milk. Still, I used to think there was something to you, back in the DoSAC days. I can’t say I’m happy to be proven right fifteen years too late for it to do any good, but good on you for getting your own back, even better for waiting until we were back in government to do it.

  
Malcolm. x

sent from my fucking iphone xiv

* * *

_**The Sunday Times** _   
**Culture**

**Nicola Murray interview: the bestselling author on writing, ambition, and life after politics**

… Did she always know she had this in her? She admits that she’s not certain. “I spent a long time after I left politics wondering if that was all there was—getting so close but failing. And don’t get me wrong—failing because I deserved to fail. But just because you’re ultimately incapable of living up to your dreams doesn’t mean the ambition isn’t still there, trying to find its way out, telling you you should be making more of yourself. I suppose I always wanted two things: to help people, to make their lives better, but also to be important.” She pauses and grimaces. “I know that’s a terrible thing to admit. Looking at it rationally, people suffered because of me, because I couldn’t see that my abilities never matched that drive. But I think that ambition to be important, to still somehow find a way to be famous, was what was trying to get out when I sat down to write. Or rather, when all these thoughts sat me down and sort of burst out of me.”

Is she planning a political comeback? Absolutely not, she insists. “I’m delighted that my book has been so warmly received, and it’s no use pretending that it isn’t satisfying to be back in the public eye. But a political comeback is exactly the opposite of what I’ve been trying to achieve. The point is not that the British public should read my book and regret that I never became Prime Minister. The point is that the person I am now, who wrote a book that people have enjoyed, is not the person who didn’t become Prime Minister. I’d never have become who I am now if I’d managed to hang on in politics, and I’d have been absolutely terrible if I’d somehow become Prime Minister.”

“If my readers take anything away from my book, I hope they’ll understand why we need a less toxic political culture, in which people from a greater variety of backgrounds can be successful—not that I’m suggesting there’s a universe in which I could have been successful. But I also hope they’ll see that it’s possible to try something, to fail spectacularly, to spend a decade wandering in the wilderness consumed by regret, and then to survive and even thrive, whatever that means to them. For myself, it’s taken a long time, but I’m much happier now than I was when I was a politician. So again, no. I won’t be making a political comeback. I’d rather eat my own toenails steamed in a pudding.”

It’s a bold choice of metaphor for a woman who once infamously uttered the phrase “self-eating cake” in a policy launch, but somehow, it seems a fitting one. Against the odds, Nicola Murray of all people has managed to have the last word.

_Curtain Material: My Life in Politics and After_ by Nicola A. Murray is available in trade paperback from Bloomsbury for £11.99 at all major booksellers.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy yuletide, Melannen! You suggested "post-canon 'I got out of politics and now I am learning to be happy again' comfort-fic," and I hope a less anxious and more self-aware Nicola Murray getting the triumphant last word many years later in the form of her generation's outstanding political memoir fits the bill. I certainly had fun writing it!


End file.
